Ivan Massow: David Cameron has betrayed gays to appease the Right

They said it was short and sweet. Well, it was short but not so sweet — at least not for anyone expecting a bill to legalise gay marriage.

The Queen’s Speech contained 19 new pieces of Government legislation for the coming year — crime, pensions, Lords reform … a list of worthy but largely necessary measures. But same-sex marriages? That bill appears to have been left in the closet.

Meanwhile, yesterday Barack Obama made history by becoming the first US president to endorse gay marriage publicly.

Some insist it’s pure electioneering — that Obama’s just trying to highlight the backward, redneck tendencies of Mitt Romney’s Republicans. But the gay marriage issue in the US is far more politically divisive than it is in Britain. Obama’s comments have already provoked a backlash. They may end up making him more enemies than friends and turning once-loyal voters against him.

So for Obama to stick his neck out publicly was a bold, progressive move. Why on earth can’t David Cameron show the same backbone?

We know he’s “emphatically” in favour of gay marriage. In his maiden speech as Conservative Party leader, he said marriage “means something whether you’re a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man”. And we’re told he “personally intervened” to start a consultation period that would enable the law to be changed before 2015.

Well, okay, Dave, that’s all well and good. But just get on with it, will you? Instead of worrying about the rabidly immoderate Catholic lobby or the grassroots Tories supposedly up in arms about the issue, just take the initiative and see it all the way through. Not just because it’s morally correct but because it’s fundamentally part of your wider Conservative agenda.

I was born in 1967, the year homosexuality was decriminalised. Not that it did me much good. Being a gay teenager in the Eighties wasn’t fun. Homophobia was rife in all levels of society — nowhere more so than in the Conservative Party.

Anti-gay legislation such as Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which precluded “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” sent a clear message to our community: the Tories found us abhorrent. Of course it didn’t actually stop people being gay; it just forced homosexuality underground, effectively estranging us from society.

Gay men had to decide whether they were part of the Establishment (and stay in the closet) or out, proud and queenie like actor John Inman. If you wanted to get ahead in anything other than show business or air stewarding, you’d opt for the former.

Gay bars were constantly harassed, especially by Tory-run Westminster council. Fear and paranoia were widespread, forcing some closet gays to marry women, thereby destroying other lives too. Gay men remained largely in a ghetto, apart from late-night encounters in public toilets and parks.

In the late Nineties, working as an adviser to Conservative leader William Hague, I played a part in changing Tory policy on homosexuality. Not just by being Lady Thatcher’s “official escort” to the 1999 party conference, but by debating gay rights with rising Conservative stars (Michael Gove, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin) and helping them understand that it was possible to be proudly gay and proudly Tory too.

Back then I felt alone as an openly homosexual political voice — the only gay in the Westminster village.

How times have changed. Since then almost an entire cabinet of Tories has come out: Nick Herbert, Alan Duncan, Greg Barker, Nigel Evans, Crispin Blunt, among others. The Conservative government now holds LGBT parties in Downing Street. They serve lovely canapés.

And the attitude of the general public towards the gay community has been transformed. Gay people fill not just “normal” roles but vital ones — unquestioned by society. We can meet openly in public wherever we wish, at banking conferences or fashionable bars.

Members of the younger gay community are not forced to lead double lives, seeking quick thrills in seedy retreats.

In fact, the younger generation are, paradoxically, adopting some of their parents’ values. A wide-ranging survey conducted last year by Jake, the gay professional network, found a marked difference between the younger and older generations’ attitudes to relationships. More than 61 per cent of under-30s believed there is a real need for gay marriage, compared with 45 per cent of the older generation. Twice as many under-30s felt a long-term relationship could be monogamous. This is a view shared by my own boyfriend, who is enviably young for a Tory veteran like me.

Gay rights have turned out to be natural Conservative thinking. They haven’t produced more homosexuals — they’ve simply made gay people valued members of society. And society is exactly what David Cameron’s Conservatives are meant to be focusing on. Inclusion and acceptance are now big Tory ideas. Gay marriage is not, as some have claimed, a “distraction”. It’s the next logical step.

Last night I attended another reception at Downing Street (I know, I know — I do pizza TV dinners as well). This one was for prospective parliamentary candidates — there was a list of a few thousand that has now been whittled down to a few hundred and I made the cut.

David Cameron was there in the distance and I was dying to get the chance to pin him down on the Queen’s Speech omission. Sadly, I didn’t manage it. Sources later told me gay marriage had been on the list, but then the “nasty older Tories and Catholics b******d things up”. They assured me it’ll happen, it’s still in consultation, on the agenda. Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard this bluster before.

One of Tony Blair’s cleverest achievements was to make an early stand against militant unions. He pushed them so far left they had nowhere else to turn.

David Cameron could do the same with the fanatical wings of his party. Where are they going to go — UKIP? The BNP? Nowhere where they’ll be taken seriously.

So, come on, Dave, take a leaf out of the book of Barack. We don’t need consultation, we need action.